Week Two: World Building

Words Written: roughly 11,000

Chapters Completed: 4

Cups of Coffee: 4 (skipped a day )

Stress Level: 2 (any stress was over not writing action scenes after being so used to doing that the first week)

Week Two once again was a great writing week. It was a lot of character and world-building wrapped up together. My heroine met two large cultural groups this week and had to fight one of them— which meant a lot of logic building as well. The area of the World of Ore that Book Two focuses on is inhabited by people with elemental abilities. Fight scenes require a bit of planning and logic to make sure my hero characters don’t seem overly powerful to the point where the fight isn’t intense. I also want to make sure the enemy is scary and proses a true threat (if not, my whole story will flop).

I felt reasonable pressure to get the story right, but a lot of it was taken off of me because I had already fleshed out most of the logic from the prior month of story planning.

I did a lot of world-building during that month, but there were some things I knew I wouldn’t have a clear picture of until I started scratching out my rough draft. Reading and writing bring a world to life in ways in which daydreaming and planning can’t scratch the surface. Details make the world feel real and characters give breath to the lungs of the story.

Reading and writing bring a world to life in ways in which daydreaming and planning can’t scratch the surface.

World-building, as you write, can be messy—even if you did a lot of it beforehand. I’ve had to go back to other chapters to add or change a detail about my world that I had just thought of. But it’s worth it if it adds depth. I’ve also learned to be careful about this. I once read that a good indicator of knowing when to stop adding is if the addition begins to subtract. Design is like that. If you add too much fluff, the essence of your piece will get swallowed up. I want my world to feel big and intensely detailed, but I don’t have to overwhelm my reader with details to drive home the message. Give the important details and allude to the others beyond. Unknowns are great. I feel like J. R. R. Tolkien does that beautifully. He authenticates his world with vivid details of the present like the landscape and the people, but then he alludes to ancient days with vague descriptions and ancient songs.

Give the important details and allude to the others beyond.

I’m by no means a master or know-it-all, but I am learning and I always will. Perhaps I will read this later on after gaining more experience and wonder what kind of coffee I was drinking, but I strongly feel that your world is as deep as the time you put into building it and it’s bigger when you don’t give it all away.

Come back next Wednesday at 10:30 to read how Week Three of writing went!

Visit arbledsoe.com for more info and to purchase her short story “Wipple and the Sîren”

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